July 7 link to cleric probed

LONDON - The British Prime Minister's intelligence and security committee is to investigate possible links between the July 7 bombers on the London Underground trains and the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.

The committee's inquiry, which started yesterday, will investigate claims the bombers slipped through the net of MI5 and Special Branch police. It will now also cover allegations that at least two of the bombers had connections to Abu Hamza's Finsbury Park mosque.

A furious row erupted yesterday over the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute Abu Hamza amid calls for an judicial inquiry to be carried out. Scotland Yard and the CPS denied that they were at loggerheads.

The intelligence and security committee is set to investigate whether MI5 was responsible for avoiding charges being laid against Hamza because they were keeping other terror suspects under surveillance at the mosque. French intelligence sources reportedly complained that they passed intelligence about Abu Hamza to the British authorities but MI5 failed to act until 2003.

- INDEPENDENT